Facebook: Parents must beat their online addiction, too

It is not enough to lecture children about being safe on the web – parents
need to free the home from a fascination with the home page

A few likes and shares do cheer her upPhoto: Getty Images

By Glenda Cooper

7:55PM BST 16 Oct 2013

Dear old Facebook. What would I do without it, to find out who’s had a baby, who’s burst into tears again on The Great British Bake Off (Ruby, of course) and who’s reached level 375,486,227 on Candy Crush?

I’ve got it on my phone, I’ve got it on my tablet, I’ve got it on my desktop. If it’s a fact that in London you’re never more than seven feet away from a rat, then in modern life, it seems, you’re never more than seven minutes from a Facebook update and a cheery blue thumbs up.

But yesterday, all those who use Facebook had a wake-up call. Peter Davies, the chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), told MPs that half of all child sexual exploitation now takes place on social-networking sites.

Facebook, of course, is not the only place where abusers stalk their prey – although “Baitbook”, as teenagers dub it, is certainly a major one. Chatrooms and other forums are also targets. Mr Davies says the images of child abuse viewed by his team are growing worse, in that the victims are getting “younger and younger” and the level of abuse is deepening.

The social-networking site says it has a global team of hundreds of safety experts, and works in partnership with CEOP to bring offenders to justice. But, as Ofcom revealed earlier this month, with one in six eight- to 11-year-olds and 60 per cent of 12- to 15-year-olds owning a smartphone, and – staggeringly – even a quarter of three- to four-year-olds using a tablet, parents are frequently scrambling to keep up with their children’s online knowledge.

And it’s not just the risk of paedophiles that is a concern, but sexual bullying among children themselves. When I spoke to the charity Beatbullying last year for a Telegraph investigation into the phenomenon of “sexting” (sending sexually provocative pictures, messages or video clips via mobile phones or the internet), the charity said that, according to its own survey, a third of children had received a sexually explicit message and a quarter had received a sexually explicit image.

Such sexting frequently turns into sexual bullying – known as “doxing” – where young people find explicit clips and photos sent without their consent.

Unthinkable? When a 14-year-old boy from Cheltenham was arrested last year after posting a pornographic video of himself and his girlfriend on Facebook, the reaction from teens was boredom. “It’s so commonplace… I doubt many would bat an eyelid,” was a frequent response from teenagers I spoke to.

Of course, sexual experimentation has always been part of teenage life – although in the past, youthful indiscretions were not condemned to digital perpetuity. And of course, as Mr Davies made clear, it is not the medium that is to blame but human behaviour; the chilling insouciance revealed in the Jimmy Savile transcripts this week shows how abusers can easily run rings around authorities in real life (“Oh! Out of the question!” was Savile’s response to police questions about specific incidents of abuse – pitifully, enough to convince them there was no further case to answer).

Yet if we want to deal with the problems of children online, it’s not them but us who really need to change our conflicting behaviour. One minute we lecture them about the dangers of excessive online activity – and then promptly use the iPad as an electronic nanny. Social networks are dangerous places, we warn, while at the same time being scarcely able to listen to an account of their day without glancing at our phones.

It’s high time we all remembered that it’s home life, not the home page, that counts.

Who needs Mr Darcy when you’ve got Mr Walliker?

What do we really look for in a v v good romantic hero? As the new Bridget Jones soars to the top of the bestseller lists in its first week of publication (47,057 hardback copies of Mad About the Boy are now in the hands of the famous singleton’s most ardent admirers), the inspiration for Bridget’s latest heart-throb has been revealed by its author, Helen Fielding.

Bridget’s previous love interest, Mark Darcy – the Christmas-jumper-wearing, tall, dark, international human rights lawyer – was based on Colin Firth’s dashing interpretation of Jane Austen’s Fitzwilliam Darcy. Her new romantic hero has rather more mundane beginnings: a tie-wearing, medium-height history teacher with a receding hairline called Andrew Walliker.

And it wasn’t any particular glowering good looks or international experience that initially inspired her: in fact, like many novelists before her, Fielding was transfixed by a name. “It’s like 'walloper’ but it’s not, and I loved it,” she told an audience at the recent Cheltenham Literary Festival.

Fielding then qualified this by saying she thought that both the character and inspiration were a bit like Daniel Craig. Mr Walliker – whose fictional counterpart rescues Bridget from up a tree and is rude about her chess-playing abilities, as well as enjoying a sex scene with the widowed heroine – initially thought Fielding was pulling his leg. But has his newfound stardom gone to his head?

Not at all: in a totally disarming style, Mr Walliker has been rather embarrassed about the whole thing, saying he’d told Fielding he had ''a face for radio’’ rather than being bestseller, romantic hero material. Most telling of all, when his wife, Angela, loyally said that he did look like Daniel Craig, Mr Walliker swiftly replied: “More Wendy Craig than Daniel Craig.”

No emotional f–––wittage here, as Bridget would say. Mr Walliker gets my vote as a worthy romantic lead – and I’m sure the late lamented Mark Darcy would agree.

A good hair day is a real power trip

Women change hairstyles an average of 36 times in a lifetime, according to a new survey. Only 36? I reckon I’m already up to 23, at least 19 of which were intentional and not just because I got caught in the rain.

At present, according to my hairdresser, my look is Asian fusion meets 1920s flame; according to everyone else, it’s a coppery bob with a blunt geometric fringe. Why? Like most women I do it to mark milestones, both bad and good: to cope with family illness, moving jobs, or just a cheerful two fingers to what life can throw at you. For hair has power: the Rapunzel and Medusa myths don’t pervade our culture by accident.

Hillary Clinton said she could knock a story off the front pages by changing hairstyle and I salute the former US secretary of state (and scrunchie fan) for that. Or as comedienne Sherri Shepherd put it: you’re born with the hair you’ve got, but you have the ability to get the hair you want; an admirable summing-up of the American dream.

If you want to be an older mother, make sure you get a good night’s sleep

The average age of women giving birth is at its highest on record, says the Office for National Statistics – with a typical new mother now giving birth just a few weeks short of her 30th birthday. Predictably, there has been much anguished debate about why this should be: the housing bubble? Women too busy climbing the corporate ladder? Less secure relationships?

The obvious answer is that women have looked at a new survey that says being a mother takes up 57 hours a week on tasks such as cooking, cleaning and washing, and thought again.

But actually I blame Eleanor Catton. Can there be an English Literature graduate in the land over the age of 30 with a novel in their bottom drawer who did not wake up with a squeak of terror to find a whippersnapper of a 28-year-old had become the youngest winner of the Man Booker Prize? And not with just any old book, but an 832-page backbreaker?

Perhaps we have misread this generation: instead of dismissing them as reluctant to grow up and settle down and relinquish playing Grand Theft Auto, they have put their reproductive lives on hold and are all secretly working away on epic tomes. Meanwhile, ladies, medical researchers have helpfully noted that women trying for a baby could dramatically increase their chances if they got between seven and eight hours sleep a night. I’m amazed anyone ever manages to have that second child.